Thesis: 'No more Workers in the Factories? Industrial Robots and Work in the Austrian Automotive Sector in the Context of the New Automation Debate'
Supervisor: Gina Neff
My dissertation represents a critical re-assessment of recent debates on the automation of industrial work. Based on a mixed-methods approach, ranging from econometrics to workplace ethnography, the goal is to understand the contradictions within and around industrial automation in developed economies. The central question therein, why there are still manufacturing jobs in the first place, is engaged through an analysis of the historically and geographically specific process of automation, through the use of industrial robots, in automotive manufacturing in Austria.
Before starting my DPhil at the Oxford department of Sociology, I was a research fellow at the European Forum, Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and Research Assistant at the Institute for the Comprehensive Analysis of the Economy (ICAE) at the Johannes-Kepler University, Linz. The research for my DPhil is funded by the Clarendon Fund and St. Antony’s College.
Research Interests: Political Economy/Economic Sociology/Heterodox Economics of Work; Critical Theory and History of Economic Thought; Social-scientific theory and the sociology of economics
Education: BA in Philosophy (University of Vienna); BSc in Economics (University of Business and Economics Vienna); MPhil in Sociology (University of Cambridge).
